Unless otherwise indicated herein, the description in this section is not prior art to the claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Many of typical image forming apparatuses store data in a hard disk drive (an HDD) as a non-volatile storage device. In this case, when the HDD becomes inoperative, this may cause the image forming apparatus to become unusable.
In this respect, there is proposed a following hard disk drive device. The hard disk drive device gives an instruction of writing or reading to an HDD and, based on its response time, predicts in advance whether or not the HDD is inoperative to separately operate before the HDD becomes inoperative.